In January, the White House obtained the release of American hostages by paying the Islamic Republic a $1.7-billion ransom. Having been thus rewarded, Tehran is still holding three British citizens prisoner. Authorities have also confiscated the passport of the two-year-old daughter of one hostage, leaving the girl stranded in Iran with one parent in prison and another in Britain. Annie Fixler and Saeed Ghasseminejad urge Britain and its allies to respond firmly:

[One hostage’s] husband recently claimed that Iran had arrested his wife in order to force the UK to settle an outstanding debt of £400 million for undelivered military equipment dating before the 1979 revolution. . . . A European court in 2010 ordered Britain to pay Iran £400 million, and London agreed, but negotiations over the repayment stalled in 2011. Now Tehran has settled on a new tactic—the same one it successfully deployed against the United States earlier this year: using hostages to wring payments from foreign capitals. . . .

After denying any link between the payment and the hostage release, the White House admitted that the cash had indeed provided it “leverage” to cement the deal. But since January, Iran has continued to detain foreign and dual citizens, and is demanding billions in ransom. Whatever leverage the cash-for-hostages situation provided, it appears to have gone not to Washington but to Tehran.

The West must respond decisively. The U.S., UK, and EU should announce that they will no longer pay ransoms for hostages. They should also sanction broad swathes of the Iranian judicial system and those members of the Iranian leadership responsible for these cynical hostage-taking policies.

These efforts should then be followed by a public campaign to isolate Tehran diplomatically, particularly by drawing attention to cases of detained dual and foreign nationals. Only when the regime pays a price for this rogue behavior will the unjust detention of dual and foreign nationals . . . come to an end.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.